Denialism From Forbes Courtesy of Heartland Hack James Taylor

It’s fascinating when you catch the start of a new bogus claim enter the denialsphere, bounce from site to site, and echo about without any evidence of critical analysis or intelligence on the part of the denialists. A good example of this was an article by Heartland Institute’s contributor to Forbes, James Taylor, falsely claiming only a minority of scientists endorse the IPCC position on the causes of global warming. This new nonsense meme gets repeated by crank extraordinaire Steve Milloy, bounces the next day to Morano’s denialist aggregation site, and before long I’m sure we’ll be seeing it on Watt’s site, Fox news, and in a couple more weeks, in an argument with our conservative uncles.
The claim is, of course, a deception (or possibly total incompetence) on the part of Heartland’s “senior fellow for environment policy” (I wonder if there is significance to the use of “environment” as opposed to “environmental”). Linking this paper in the journal Organization studies, Taylor makes a false claim that a mere 36% of scientists, when surveyed, hold the consensus view. Anyone want to guess at the deception? Cherry-picking! It was a survey of largely industry engineers and geoloscientists in Alberta, home of the tar sands. In the study authors’ words:

To address this, we reconstruct the frames of one group of experts who have not received much attention in previous research and yet play a central role in understanding industry responses – professional experts in petroleum and related industries. Not only are we interested in the positions they take towards climate change and in the recommendations for policy development and organizational decision-making that they derive from their framings, but also in how they construct and attempt to safeguard their expert status against others. To gain an understanding of the competing expert claims and to link them to issues of professional resistance and defensive institutional work, we combine insights from various disciplines and approaches: framing, professions literature, and institutional theory.

This is pretty classic denialist cherry-picking and and is one of the most common deceptive practices of denialists like Taylor. By suggesting a survey of industry geoscientists can be generalized to scientists as whole, Taylor has demonstrated the intellectual dishonesty inherent in denialist argumentation. You might as well make claims about the consensus that tobacco causes lung cancer by surveying scientists in the Altria corporation headquarters.
The paper is actually quite interesting, and I’m glad I read it, as it is consistent with our thesis that ideological conflicts result in refusal to accept science that contradicts one’s overvalued ideas or personal interests. The authors surveyed a professional association of geoscientists in Alberta Canada (APEGGA), most of whom are working for the petroleum industry, and then performed a detailed analysis of their free-text responses on why they accept or reject climate science. What they found was there are 5 general “frames” used by respondents that their answers conformed to. The most common response was that global warming is real, and we need to act with regulation to address the problem (at 36%, the number quoted by Taylor to suggest there is no consensus), another 5% expressed doubt at the cause but agreed green house gases needed to be regulated. The second most common responses were “it’s nature” or “it’s a eco-regulatory conspiracy” and these responses showed a great deal of hostility in language towards environmentalism, proponents of global warming, liberalism etc. These came in at about 34% of responses and were more common from older white males in the higher tiers of the oil industry corporate structure. The most common remaining frame was a “fatalist” frame (17%) which could take or leave the science because hey, we’re screwed no matter what we do.
The authors weren’t attempting to validate the consensus with this study, but rather were trying to understand how scientists working in industry justify their position on global warming, as they often reject the consensus view of climate science. When a true cross-section of climate scientists is sampled, agreement with consensus is found among about 90% of scientists and 97% of those publishing in the field. A more appropriate summary of what these authors showed was that oil industry geoscientists and engineers most frequently express a view consistent with the consensus IPCC view and a need for regulation of green house gases. A similar but slightly smaller number express hostility to the consensus view and about half as many as that think we’re screwed no matter what we do.
It all would have been short-circuited if Forbes had exercised any kind of appropriate editorial control over this crank James Taylor. Or, if the echo chamber had read some of the comments on the initial post before rebroadcasting a false claim far and wide, but then, that would require intellectual honesty and a desire to promote factual information. Does Forbes have any interest that one of their bloggers is misrepresenting the literature in this way? Is this acceptable practice among their contributors? Is this the kind of publication they wish to be?
Finally, I see the authors of the paper (who I alerted to the Forbes article’s presence – they clearly were not contacted by Taylor for comment) have response. From their comment:

First and foremost, our study is not a representative survey. Although our data set is large and diverse enough for our research questions, it cannot be used for generalizations such as “respondents believe …” or “scientists don’t believe …” Our research reconstructs the frames the members of a professional association hold about the issue and the argumentative patterns and legitimation strategies these professionals use when articulating their assumptions. Our research does not investigate the distribution of these frames and, thus, does not allow for any conclusions in this direction. We do point this out several times in the paper, and it is important to highlight it again.
In addition, even within the confines of our non-representative data set, the interpretation that a majority of the respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of global warming is simply not correct. To the contrary: the majority believes that humans do have their hands in climate change, even if many of them believe that humans are not the only cause. What is striking is how little support that the Kyoto Protocol had among our respondents. However, it is also not the case that all frames except “Support Kyoto” are against regulation – the “Regulation Activists” mobilize for a more encompassing and more strongly enforced regulation. Correct interpretations would be, for instance, that – among our respondents – more geoscientists are critical towards regulation (and especially the Kyoto Protocol) than non-geoscientists, or that more people in higher hierarchical positions in the industry oppose regulation than people in lower hierarchical positions.

Incompetence or deception by Taylor? You tell me. Either way, this is the kind of shoddy, non-academic discourse we get from bogus ideological think tanks like Heartland. They should be embarrassed.
Article Cited:
Lianne M. Lefsrud and Renate E. Meyer
Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change Organization Studies November 2012 33: 1477-1506, doi:10.1177/0170840612463317

Disinformation about Disinformation: L. Gordon Crovitz's Information Age

When one spouts disinformation about disinformation, does it make it information? No, it’s L. Gordon Crovitz’s “Information Age,” the weekly poorly informed and poorly reasoned blather about information policy in the Wall Street Journal.
Recall that Crovitz recently wrote about the invention of the Internet and online privacy. I wrote about these last two columns, and this week in the Journal Crovitz tries to backpedal, with the standard trope that his “Who Really Invented the Internet?” article was controversial—”It [became] for a time the most read, emailed and commented upon article on the Journal’s website, with more than 1,000 comments.” It was popular in the same way that reality stars enjoy popularity.
Crovitz tries to explain that he was reacting to President Obama’s recent speech about government and business. Crovitz responds that:

• Government alone didn’t create the Internet.
• Government didn’t help build the Internet in order to create commercial opportunities.
• Companies that succeed on the Internet do not succeed because of government.

Of course, this is not what Crovitz said last week. He said:

If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox.

Full credit. Not shared credit.
To Crovitz’s second point, government builds a lot of things that have secondary uses in the commercial market. The many inventions of NASA, for instance, were first developed to execute space travel, and these technologies find their way into the commercial sector.
To Crovitz’s third point, companies do succeed on the Internet because of government. There is plenty of interaction and cooperation between high tech companies and government, and that is why high tech companies are not libertarian. If high tech companies were severed from the government gravy train, innovation would suffer. We’d have fewer drones and other wonderful technologies.
More fundamentally, so many internet entrepreneurs came from America’s college and university system, where big government funding helps develop leaders like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Wozniak and others.
This tech libertarian “I am an island” meme is fully debunked by Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish. In that book, Borsook lampoons arguments of Crovitz’s sort: “The most virulent form of philosophical technolibertarianism is a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism. It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us consider it means to be human. It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior…”
But back to Crovitz:

Supporters of big government don’t want to hear about the private-sector contributions to the Internet…

What is Crovitz’s basis for this crazy talk? This is an unhinged straw man argument. Any sensible person recognizes that private-sector contributions are critical to all sorts of ventures.

…but today the Internet is defined by individuals using it for their own purposes—communicating, accessing social media—and critiquing opinion columns. Many innovations are via free, open-source software. Perhaps we can all at least agree that the Internet boom began in the mid-1990s when the government shut down its remaining role, leaving the Internet to the power of the people.

The government never shut down its role in the internet. Has this guy ever heard of the Department of Commerce and ICANN? Or the NSF?
How did this guy get this column and is there no one at the Journal that recognizes it for what it is, or is this a case of crank magnetism?

Don’t Screw with T.J.

DaveScot, crank extraordinaire at Uncommon Descent, has made the mistake of talking about Thomas Jefferson now that there is UVa representation on the Scienceblogs.

He makes the argument that because the constitution only dealt with federal separation of church and state (before the reconstruction amendments of course) that established religion was perfectly ok in the states.

You see, the intent of declaring that inalienable rights are bestowed by a Creator is not just ceremonial. It’s a core principle. It’s what makes the rights inalienable. Governments exist only to secure these rights not to grant them for if governments are the source of these rights then governments can rightly take them away. Thus it is important to remember that a higher authority exists that grants these rights so that no government can take them away.

So you see, when Jefferson and a few other founders talked about a wall of separation they were only talking about a wall between federal government and churches. State governments could do whatever they wanted with laws regarding religion. I mention the 14th because it adds crucial context to the early use of the phrase Jefferson coined i.e.; it was only about federal laws at that time. None of them were arguing that state and local governments couldn’t do as they saw fit and this ties neatly back into the articles I wrote about preambles in state constitutions. States weren’t nearly as bashful about God and government as the federal government was in the early days.

Now, you can’t hope to win by citing Jefferson here, all UVa students are required to defend Jefferson from false representation. Further, if these guys actually bothered reading anything after the preambles you see that many states not only forbade establishment of religion but forbade clergy from even participating in government!
Continue reading “Don’t Screw with T.J.”

Beware the bashers of peer review

I’d like to hear from some other sciencebloggers and science readers what they think reform of peer-review should look like. I’m not of the opinion that it has any critical flaws, but most people would like to see more accountability for sand-bagging and other bad reviewer habits. Something like a grading system that allows submitters to rate the performance of their reviewers, then editors of magazines would tend to only consult with reviewers that authors felt were doing a fair job of evaluating their paper.

The drawback of course would be that reviewers might start going easier on papers just because they don’t want bad grades.

One thing I do know for sure though, we shouldn’t take advice about peer review from HIV/AIDS denialists…
Continue reading “Beware the bashers of peer review”

Ed Brayton Exposes Sal Cordova’s Cherry Picking

It was pointed out in a comment in our FRC post how much cherry picking resembles rank dishonesty.

That’s because it is. Deception is inherent in denialist arguments, and there are few better examples than Sal Cordova’s selective quotation as demonstrated by Ed Brayton in Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
Continue reading “Ed Brayton Exposes Sal Cordova’s Cherry Picking”

Selectivity from the Family Research Council

Some might wonder why I include some right-wing “family” organizations on the list of denialists. It’s simple. In their efforts to oppose all forms of contraception, they routinely lie about the science behind the efficacy of condoms for STD-prevention (just like HIV/AIDS denialists), the efficacy of contraception, as well as social effects of contraception like the falsehood that contraceptive availability leads to promiscuity and higher STD transmission.

Take for instance, the Family Research Council on emergency contraception.

(republished from denialism.com – this was too good an example to pass up)
*Update* Calladus has a good overview of their “research” into the efficacy of abstinence education. What kind of family value is lying anyway?
Continue reading “Selectivity from the Family Research Council”